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Recent Reviews
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, trans. by Michele Hutchison
Rave The New Statesman (UK) ...majestic dread ... Sly, surprising, gently chaotic, it’s the most singular and strident debut I’ve read in a long time ... Jas’s language is clean and plain, convincingly childlike, but strikingly poetic – even (or especially) when it is describing the mucky corporeality of rural life. The warts on a toad are like capers, the glands prone to ooze sour oil just like the edible green buds. The smells and excretions of the animals and the banal grotesquery of her interactions with them mount up to portray life as an unlovely thing. Matthies, in death, is pristine and beautiful, untouched even by conversation ... It isn’t a pleasant book to read ... Though tender, the novel resists narrative redemption, but provides its own kind of consolation through artistry and originality ... The magical thinking of this child produces a truly haunting and savage loneliness, communicated by Rijneveld with an agile intensity I have rarely encountered.
Kate Lister
Positive The New Statesman One of the prime pleasures of Kate Lister’s lively A Curious History of Sexis getting a sense of the continuum between ourselves and our ancestors. It can be difficult to conceptualise people who lived centuries ago as vivid, funny individuals, but being horny, it turns out, is a great leveller of time. The major accomplishment of this history is to share enough arcane, surprising information about sex and sexual mores to make it a riot to read, while humanising the participants by way of their own silliness, abjectness and randiness ... Quite a lot here is straightforwardly, smuttily good fun ... Whether you enjoy A Curious History of Sex or not may have to do with your opinion of Lister’s tone, which is exuberant and gleefully vulgar ... I’m all for de-academicising, but my teeth were regularly set on edge. Writing and speaking frankly like this is possibly very useful for people who struggle to confront their bodies and sexualities, but if you’re an unrepressed adult, it all starts to feel a bit Benny Hill ... Much of the book’s best, serious work overrides these tonal misgivings, though.